Dalip picked up the knife and followed her. To Mary, the blade seemed hopelessly short for the task, but he clutched at it anyway. It was his strength, and she wasn’t going to point out its inadequacies. In order to take the stairs, she had to hold her skirts up, grabbing a handful of cloth at each side and lifting to reveal her bare feet.

Dalip snagged the lantern to hold over her head. The shadows leapt and flowed, and they made her feel less brave with every foot forward. The dark, the noise, the wind: Stanislav could be anywhere in the castle, in any form, hiding deliberately or actively seeking them out.

The stairs unwound to the bottom. The storm howled at the doorway, sucking at the air inside one moment, blustering it back in the next. Lightning crackled, tearing thunder from the clouds and rolling it around the natural bowl of rock that was outside the walls.

‘Back to where we saw him before?’ she asked – shouted at – Dalip.

‘It’s where we start.’

The lantern, despite its cover, guttered and died. The liminal light in the sky was insufficient to make out detail, but when the lightning flickered and stabbed at the mountain-top, it was enough to show that the guard house, and part of the wall beyond, had collapsed into ruin.

‘Stanislav?’

They approached slowly. Mary’s skirts threatened to turn into a sail and carry her away, and Dalip was bent over against the swirling wind that tried to rob the words from their mouths.

The building was blown down, or out. Loose blocks of stone lay in a heap, and wooden beams stuck out of the remains of the sagging roof like broken ribs.

‘Do you suppose he’s under there?’ she said to Dalip’s ear.

It took him a moment to parse the words, then put his mouth to her ear. ‘We can’t dig. Not by ourselves.’

They reversed positions again. ‘It’d be easier for us if he was.’

He took a step back, nothing but darker black against the night. When the lightning flashed – close, so close that the concussion was almost simultaneous. ‘I owe him,’ he said in the silence afterwards.

‘So let’s keep looking.’

They moved unsteadily towards the partly fallen wall. Debris was both inside and out, and Mary suddenly realised what this was. She beckoned Dalip down to her height.

‘The castle is being reburied. With so few people here now, it’s sinking back into the ground. It grows, it dies.’